The Sacrifice Game

(49)

“Now the Southeastern peak breathes blood,” the Wedding Symposiarch sang,

“So now unfurl the newborn warlord, peacelord,

Sun-eyed avenger, Lord of Morning Twilight,

One Turquoise Ocelot. And now face Coldwards

And now to Whitewards, now to Knownwards, now

Enthrall to him and face the Unrevealed.”

And in fact the orange steam all around me was so fierce that when they lifted me out I did feel newborn, in fact prematurely born, and as I began scraping the extruded sebum flesh-worms off my open-pored swollen skin with cockleshells it felt like they were carving me out of a protostellar cloud. This second room was like a tepidarium, cooler and lighter than the sweat bath, with a slatey predawn glow dripping through the oculus. The beat was clearer out here, although I didn’t need to hear it at all anymore since I was sure my heart had been permanently tuned to it. At this point it was like the world ticking on forever. Or at least until 4 Ahau, 2012. My dressers rubbed a base coat of harpy-eagle oil into my spongy white flesh and began clothing me, or rather wrapping me, tying my long red cotton wex with a complicated female-style knot like a pillow in my lower back, a knot that was only used at weddings. You’re always getting dressed or undressed around here, I thought. It’s all before and after, you’re always getting ready to make an offering or coming back from making an offering and getting ready to make another offering, and the actual thing was usually over in a beat. They inserted a new plug in my lip, a female one, and fresh spondylus shell spools in my ears, and an embroidered anesthetic herbal ball in my empty eye socket to soak up the tears.

I’d be appearing in women’s clothes-and Lady Koh would be in male clothes-because we were going to be a sun-telling couple. That is, we were both father-mothers. I guess the cross-dressing sounds a little odd for a wedding, but actually you could still sometimes see Maya shamans wearing women’s clothes at harvest festivals in the twenty-first century. Anyway, like a lot of things, it had to be done this way. One thing I could be sure of was that Koh had checked every detail.

Lady Koh needed to marry me. Or, rather, she needed to marry the Ahau and K’alomte of Ix. The Classic Maya world wasn’t so gynophobic as, say, Islamic society, but women who wanted to run things still had to do it through their menfolk. Or, at best, in the Yaxchilanian and Ixian and other traditions, they had to be widows of the ahau. Which was what she’d be in a few months. I’d be as canned as Charlie the Tuna and she’d still be corking along. And if she conceived a male child with me, that would be even better for her. She could reign until he was blooded, at fifteen or sixteen, and then, undoubtedly, keep him tied to the huipil strings. Or if she didn’t, she could either adopt an Ocelot baby or even fake a pregnancy and just pick up some kid from the slave market. So I was a convenient choice. And, as the miraculously revivified Chacal, the semidivine hipball legend who’d predicted the San Martin eruption, I was, especially with Koh’s spin-doctoring, even a popular choice with a large slice of the public. Of course, a lot of folks still viewed me with extreme suspicion. But things had changed a lot in Ix, and throughout Mesoamerica, over the last tun, and people had come to accept events that, before the destruction of Teotihuacan, would have seemed upside down.

Even so, though, I was lucky. Koh could have set up somebody else, probably one of the younger Ocelot bloods. So I was pretty sure that Koh’s real motivation was that she really wanted me to get back to the thirteenth b’aktun. I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure why. But I wasn’t ruling out sheer goodwill, or, let’s say, sheer sense of duty. She saw her role as a protector of her lineage, and if she could protect their descendants long after her death, her uays would remain powerful long b’aktuns from now. They might even grow more powerful. After all, despite everything she’d learned from me about astronomy and physics and even twenty-first-century thought in general, she was still a believer.

And, also, she had 2 Jeweled Skull in her custody.

I hadn’t seen it happen. Koh’s men had surrounded him during the Earthstar riots and, amazingly, had taken him alive. Now she had him in a basket in what had been the Ocelots torture pavilion, with two guards watching him at all times so that he couldn’t commit suicide in some clever way like, say, biting a chunk out of the inside of his cheek and swallowing his own blood until he bled to death-something that had, in fact, been done more than once by twenty-year captives.

On the other hand, a lot of the Ball Brethren and the other Harpies were still loyal to 2 Jeweled Skull, so we had to treat him well and keep up the polite fiction, which of course nobody believed, that I was taking over the Harpy House at his request. And, I suspected, Koh was cagily holding him in reserve. If I got out of line she could always reinstate him and get rid of me. Just one more reason I had to watch it.

My two dressers stood me up. My stump sank into the wicker cone of my shell-inlaid leg-which was made from the femur of someone larger than I’d been, and carved as a snake with its head straining forward where my foot would be-and they wove it onto my knee with gut straps. It still hurt a bit inside despite all the analgesic salves. They combed my hair with a brush like a whisk broom and oiled it, scented it, corded it, beaded it, bound it, tasseled it, and attached the extensions. They wrapped me in a long red skirt with obsidian-mirror stars and sewed me into a sort of feather-woven tunic. My new valet fastened wide neon-orange spiny-oyster shell cuffs around my upper arms and jade ones just above my wrists. Another back-sash went around my waist and they draped a white-jade beaded sort of poncholike thing over my shoulders. My hairdresser coiled all the complicated hair into a bun and set it into what was kind of like a spangled turban with a stuffed muan bird on the top, a combination critter made of several other birds with the head of a baby caiman and the beak of a condor. Then they dusted me off.

The cantor crouched out through the tiny door first. He was a famous neutral-clan professional adder from Kaminaljuyu, whose poetic name was On The Left, and who I guess you could also call the toastmaster or the master of ceremonies. He was serving as the head of my marriage-sponsor party. The dressers half picked me up and handed me out to him. The little room had gotten full of hot and sour breath and carbon di- and monoxide, like we were inside a big smokers’ lung, and now the fresh air sucked on me.

We were in the same inner courtyard of the Harpy House where 2 Jeweled Skull had stored me in a scavenger’s-daughter body basket a billion psychological years and 244 days ago. The square of sky looked like an old chalkboard with Eos’s talons scraping on the eastern side. My two marriage-sponsors stood at the west side of the court: 24 Pine, that is, Coach Teentsy Bear, who was taking the part of my halach ayadoj, that is, the equivalent of my godfather-and an elder Harpy named 4 Wren, whom I’d adopted as my surrogate father. I’d sent for Teentsy when I heard he hadn’t quite been killed during the battle, and he and I had gotten pretty close again-again, that is, in that he’d been close to Chacal. I was less crazy about 4 Wren. But Koh had been adamant that dynastically and politically speaking he was the only real choice. Our main problem now was legitimization. Anyway, the sponsors’ roles were just ceremonial. Elders had to be brought in as go-betweens and surrogate parents in the marriage negotiations, which were supposedly kept secret from the bride and groom-although of course in this case Koh was running everything.

The six of us left the compound through the west door, headed through an alley between high fretted walls, and went down a swept and red feather-strewn stepped walkway toward the ghatlike steps leading down into the canalized lake. Guards in black night-raid paint kept pace with us on either side, with more ahead and behind, part of a rotating squad of sixty full-blood Rattler guards. Since they weren’t part of the official entourage they had to protect us from a slight distance, but we’d kept them on high alert. The Snuffler and Macaw clans and their dependents were as resentful as ever, and what was left of the Ocelot dependents were obviously still in a murderous rage, no matter what cessation oaths they’d sworn. Well, what fricking ever, I thought, we’re going to take care of all that tonight. And if they didn’t like it they were in for yet another little purge. I was becoming a big believer in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Stalinists. And Habit number 1 was “Kill First, Interview Later.”

The Rattlers had repaired the floating bridge to the occupied Ocelot compounds and the court precinct. Ten of our dark guards crossed and stationed themselves along the bridge before we even stepped onto the rustling wood. We went single-file, first the so-called godfather, then the so-called father, then me, then my two dressers, then On The Left, the cantor, and finally a beater striking a muffled water drum, so softly you could barely hear it-since the procession to the bride’s family’s house was supposedly a secret, even though, again, everybody in town knew about it. From here you couldn’t see the peninsula that connected Ix’s temple district to the mountains behind, and the encrustation of muls dotted with watch fires in the cold mist looked ageless and aloof, like the island of Mont Saint-Michel. At the far end of the bridge we could just see the newly enlarged Rattler House, which had been built on Ocelot grounds just north of the council palace. The sky and its reflection had shifted to transparent Prussian blues with strings of Swainson’s hawks, coming through right on schedule, uncoiling across them. An osprey stooped down into the water on our left and disappeared with barely a splash. I was afraid it wouldn’t come up, but finally it resurfaced with a big catfish writhing in its talons and made its way heavily shoreward. If the fish had dragged it down everybody would probably have thought it was such a bad omen they would have called the whole thing off. Yesterday one of Koh’s spies had said that some bloods from the Snuffler clan had heard about the wedding and were going to try to stop it. They’d been behind more than a few “little disturbances,” or what you might call civil unrest or gang squabbles, over the last ten days, and they were getting more belligerent despite or because of Koh’s death squads. So everyone was a little edgy.

In the center of the bridge we met the spy. He came within twenty steps of us, wheeled around, and ran back to the Rattler House to warn Koh’s relatives. He was an expected part of the act. We stepped down off the bridge and up the steps to a small zocalo that led around the corner of the high council house and into an approach to the fresh serpent-headed wall of Koh’s new compound. There were squeals. Fifteen or so young girls-either Koh’s unmarried female relations or Rattler neophytes taking the part of them or some combination-blocked the entrance to the front court and started throwing pebbles at us, yelling that they weren’t going to let us in, they knew what we were up to, and they weren’t going to let me take Koh away from them even if we chopped them into little bits. I held my left hand over my last eye. The stones got larger and we backed away. Teentsy Bear must have actually gotten a painful hit because he yelped, a real rarity for him, and seemed about to start cursing the girls back. Of course, the little altercation was just another hoary ritual, but Teentsy had zero sense of humor and tended to take things too seriously. On The Left nudged him from behind, telling him to chill out. Sports types never knew how to behave.

“Blue-green daughters here, four breaths, please, four, jade daughters,” the cantor said, appearing from behind us.

The girls eased up on the damn rocks. The cantor walked up to them like Gandhi walking up to a line of British troops.

“A red blood begs for rest beside your hearth,” he said.

The gals calmed down and let him through. He entered the compound. We waited. After four hundred beats-about six minutes and fifteen seconds-the cantor appeared again, made the sign for “patience” at us, and went back in. We stood for another eight hundred beats. The deal was that he was supposed to be begging Koh’s parents to let us inside. I wobbled a bit on my snake-foot.

The cantor came out and gestured for my sponsors and the girls to follow him in. Still, I stood for another twelve hundred beats. The dressers touched up my face paint and dusted me with a sort of blue-clay talcum powder. The beater kept thumping. How did he stand it? I wondered. He was just a human clock. He must be crazy. Come to think of it, professional beaters did tend to act a little odd. The girls gawked at us while, at the same time, trying not to look interested. Finally the cantor came out a third time and gestured for me to come in. I told one of my dressers to run and get the gifts, although if they were on the ball the porters would have already followed us here. I blood-walked alone through the gate into the little courtyard. The first person I recognized was 3 Talon, the Caracara father-mother and aerial-clan patriarch, whom I’d last seen on the burning mul at Teotihuacan. Since he was Koh’s godfather he stood to the left of the single door to the house. 1 Gila, who was taking the part of Koh’s “father,” stood on the right. Lady Vanilla Orchid, Koh’s mother-her real, biological mother, by the way, brought with On The Left, at some risk and expense from Kaminaljuyu-stood way to the left, near the girls, between the charmingly named Lady Creosote Bush, Koh’s sort of mother superior from the Caracara Clan’s Orb Weaver Sorority, and Lady Sourdough, who had kind of the same relationship to Koh in the Rattler Society. Two Rattler monkey scribes crouched on a single mat next to the north wall, ready to take down everything anyone said. The giggle of girls crowded against the south wall with their backs to us, which was considered their most respectful position. I have to admit, purdah systems do have a certain eroticism. When women seem like a totally different and inaccessible species they’re maybe more violently attractive.

There was a pair of Rattler-blood guards at each corner of the yard, and a lookout crouching on each corner of the wall above them. One of Koh’s hunchbacks unrolled a reed trading mat, about one rope-length square, and I squatted on its eastern threshold side, with my back to the gate to show that I didn’t have any enemies. I saluted everyone in order, first 1 Gila-calling him “father”-and then my own so-called father, 4 Wren, and then this wife of his who was playing my mother, and finally Koh’s mother. I’m using the word salute, but really there were dozens of different sign-greetings, everything from banging your nose on the ground and licking the dirt to just stiffening up a little, and which one to use depended on who you were and whom you were talking to. Then there was a little interminable speech I had to say and a triply interminable speech back from each of them. Basically I just said, “Hi, my name’s 9 Wax, I’m not worthy,” and they said, “Hi, yeah, we know.”

My porters trooped in behind me ahead of cue. One of them stood behind me, holding a tall capped jar with my preserved leg inside, just to show that no enemy had gotten it and I was still, officially, a whole person. The head bearer laid three big balls of fresh highland jade, all ready to be worked, in the center of the mat. She stepped back as the other porters started laying baskets around the stones in radial arms, and then followed after them, counterclockwise around the mat, lifting off the close-woven lids. She started with the dishes in front of me, clusters of popped amaranth seeds held together by bright red achiote syrup and molded into Chak figurines, coiled strings of an especially rare kind of tiny chili pepper that supposedly made you bear male children, red manioc wafers and roasted mamey sapote, sweet potato meat sculpted into rabbits and parrots like baroque marzipan, and finally a vat of powdered cochineal extracted from what I figured must have been around two and a half billion cactus-scale Dactylopiae.